Catherine Reagor
Catherine Reagor is a senior real estate and housing reporter and columnist for The Arizona Republic, known for sustained, data-driven coverage of metro Phoenix’s housing market across booms, busts and the current affordability crisis. Her reporting consistently links individual property deals and development projects to wider questions of housing access, investment trends and the region’s economy. She uses detailed public real estate records and long-built sourcing to explain how the market works for homeowners, renters, investors and communities.
Metro Phoenix housing market through boom, bust and recovery
Reagor has covered the metro Phoenix housing market for well over two decades, tracking the 2000s housing boom, the subsequent crash, the recovery, the 2021 buying frenzy and the current market.
Her coverage uses sales data, public records and trend analysis to show how shifts in prices, inventory and lending affect the region’s growth and stability. She is recognised within the masthead and by industry groups as a senior voice on real estate, with regional and national awards for her reporting on Arizona’s housing market.
Across her body of work, longer explanatory pieces place current headlines in the context of past cycles, giving readers a historical frame for understanding today’s conditions.
Luxury home sales and high-value deals
One recurring strand of Reagor’s beat is coverage of high-end residential transactions and major commercial real estate deals, often involving prominent buyers, sellers or landmark properties. She writes detailed stories on multimillion-dollar mansion sales, such as Paradise Valley homes changing hands between professional athletes, and other luxury properties that set the upper end of the market.
Her reporting on major purchases, including nine-figure deals for retail centers, breaks down the sale price, the parties involved and what the deal signals for investment in specific submarkets. Headlines about priciest home sales and marquee transactions are a regular part of her archive and are grounded in public records.
In interviews about her work, she notes that the strong readership for these luxury and high-value deal stories gives her room to devote substantial reporting time to less glamorous but more urgent issues in housing.
Evictions, housing insecurity and affordability
Reagor’s coverage of housing insecurity and evictions is a defining through-line in her work, and she began tracking metro Phoenix’s housing insecurity problem before the broader crisis drew widespread attention.
She reports on eviction trends and court filings, including recent coverage of how local renters faced some of the worst eviction orders in the country and what policy measures are in place to respond. Her stories follow investor activity in mobile and manufactured home parks, documenting large portfolio purchases and the impact on affordable housing stock. She also covers initiatives aimed at expanding access to homeownership, such as a $100 million effort focused on boosting Latino homeownership in the region, where she combines event reporting with explanations of how new programs work and who they are designed to help.
Her work on affordable neighborhoods identifies areas where home prices remain within reach, using specific price thresholds and neighborhood-level data to map where lower-cost options still exist. Across these pieces, she treats evictions, investor consolidation, affordability and targeted homeownership programs as interconnected parts of the housing system.
Growth, development and neighborhood change
Beyond individual sales, Reagor regularly reports on major development projects and the evolution of key districts, tying real estate activity to broader growth patterns. Her coverage of downtown assets such as the Arizona Center traces their history, ownership changes and planned redevelopment, highlighting how large projects reshape commercial hubs over time.
She follows new multifamily construction, including apartment projects in areas like the warehouse district, to show where density is increasing and how builders are repositioning older neighborhoods. Her reporting also extends to questions of long-term regional growth, including whether population trends could eventually blur the lines between major cities in the state. In pieces on large retail acquisitions and other development deals, she explains how new owners and projects fit into the region’s trajectory for jobs, shopping corridors and infrastructure.
Taken together, these stories show Reagor’s focus on how real estate decisions drive and reflect neighborhood change as much as they do property values.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aaron Elstein
Aaron Elstein brings a Wall Street reporter’s eye to commercial real estate. He is a senior reporter at Crain’s New York Business, where he covers large office towers, Midtown corridors, landlords, lenders, investors and regulators. His reporting shows how ownership decisions, bank balance sheets, capital markets and regulation shape property values and risk. He also covers banking, finance and Wall Street, including bank mergers and investment firms. Before joining Crain’s in 2003, he wrote Heard on the Street columns for The Wall Street Journal and covered bank mergers for American Banker. Elstein reports by closely reading footnotes, contracts, regulatory filings and legal documents. His investigative work has examined executive payments, pension funds, tax enforcement and tenant harassment. His coverage places deals, disputes and enforcement actions within broader financial and property cycles.
Aaron Moselle
Aaron Moselle covers housing and community development for WHYY’s PlanPhilly, filing for radio and the web. He stands out for connecting market data and government action to displacement, affordable homes, and the daily questions facing renters and homeowners. His core beat is housing affordability and market strain, including high mortgage rates, rising prices, tax assessments, and what they mean for buyers, sellers, and renters. He also reports on preserving and creating affordable housing, neighborhood rehab efforts, major real estate deals, and the effect of property sales on residents. His work often uses direct sourcing, plain language, and service journalism to make policy and finance clear.
Aarthi Swaminathan
Aarthi Swaminathan is a personal finance reporter at MarketWatch whose distinctive beat connects residential real estate with household budgets. She covers housing prices, affordability, mortgage rates, financing, insurance, remodeling and the costs of owning a home. Her reporting examines overvalued and fast-rising markets, ZIP-code trends, second-home sellers, builders, developers and buyers facing higher borrowing costs. She also follows Gen Z buyers, owners trapped in weakening condo markets and neighborhood conflicts over development. Her work pairs data-driven housing analysis with detailed case studies of buyers, owners and sellers. She explains complex market data in clear, accessible language and writes news features, personal-finance explainers, Economic Report stories, The Big Move and New American Playbook. She won a silver award for Best Collection of Work by an Individual Covering Residential Real Estate.
Abbey Ferguson
Abbey Ferguson stands out for reporting how major commercial moves and redevelopment plans reshape the built environment, especially the real estate deals that reveal what land and retail space are worth. She covers Central Texas commercial real estate and development for KWTX, with recent stories on land valuation, major transactions, retail redevelopment, and infrastructure planning. Her work has tracked an $80 million data center site offer in Hill County, a prospective Trader Joe’s location in Waco, and a planning project using artificial intelligence to predict traffic patterns. She writes as a news reporter, staying close to the numbers, public records, brokers, officials, and landowners. Her stories turn contract prices, appraisal data, and listing history into plain explanations of what buyers are betting on and how those deals affect surrounding property owners and nearby businesses.